From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: crossd@gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 11:14:34 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped In-Reply-To: <1403103840.16031.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> References: <1403103840.16031.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: The paper with that quote is still linked from dmr's page: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 11:03 AM, Norman Wilson wrote: > Interesting - what's your source? It was also my understanding they > used the -7 'because it was there' but that they had pitched for a > PDP-10, which had TOPS-10. > > ====== > > I think Doug's source is in the class `personal observation.' > He was there at the time; Ken and Dennis's department head, if > I've got it right. > > Remember that Bell Labs had just disengaged itself from the > Multics project. The interest in a new OS sprang partly > from the desire to have a comfortable multi-user system > now that Multics was no longer available. That's why the > DEC operating systems of the time, which were (as I understand > it) simple single-user monitors, didn't fill the bill. > > The character of the players matters too: remember that > Ken is the guy who one night sat down to write a Fortran > compiler because real systems have Fortran, and ended up > inventing B instead. > > I've read that there was indeed a pitch to buy a PDP-10; that > there was some complicated plan to lower the effective cost; > and that upper management (not Doug) turned it down because > `Bell Labs doesn't do business that way.' I think I got that > from Dennis's retrospective paper, published in the 1984 > all-UNIX issue of the Bell Labs Techical Journal, a must-read > (along with the late-1970s all-UNIX issue of BSTJ) for anyone > on this list. > _______________________________________________ > TUHS mailing list > TUHS at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: